I am delighted to announce that ORCID has been awarded further funding by The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. This 18-month, $1.84M award follows our initial $3M award from the Helmsley Charitable Trust. It allows us to leverage the progress we have made engaging the community and increasing ORCID adoption and use over the last 18 months, and also to ensure that our technical offering scales appropriately as we grow.
Community Engagement
Over the last year, ORCID membership has grown dramatically and now stands at over 550 members globally. We welcomed as members national consortia in New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Finland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, UK, and four regional consortia in the U.S., together representing over half our total membership. These groups include universities, government entities, and research funders.
With Crossref and DataCite, we launched end-to-end ORCID integration in publishing and data repository systems, enabling researchers to opt for their ORCID records to be automatically updated when they publish an article or dataset – a key element of our vision. We also provided support for announcements by several publishers and societies who require, or plan to require iDs for their authors in 2016.
Over 2.6 million researchers now have an ORCID iD, and over 7 million papers and datasets are connected to iDs in the ORCID registry and in databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Europe PubMed Central. Information interoperability is becoming a reality for researchers.
Scaling to Information Interoperability
In parallel with this adoption curve, reliance on ORCID as a trusted component of the information infrastructure is increasing. As ORCID identifiers and services become an integral component of the research infrastructure for research institutions, research funders, and publishers, it becomes more and more important for us to formalize our processes and ensure that our team is communicating effectively. We also need to clearly articulate how (and how not) to integrate ORCID identifiers.
Thanks to the generous Phase II funding from the Helmsley Charitable Trust, we will shortly be initiating our ReSPECT project, which targets three key areas of our operations: Reliability, Security, and Privacy; Engagement and Sustainability; and Communications and Training. At the end of this project, our goal is to have developed mature services and supporting training materials, and have reached our sustainability goals. In short, we plan to have transformed from start-up to small-team resiliency.
And guess what – we are hiring again! Open positions are posted on the ORCID team page at https://orcid.org/about/team.
ABOUT THE HELMSLEY CHARITABLE TRUST
The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust aspires to improve lives by supporting effective nonprofits in health, place-based initiatives, and education and human services. Since 2008, when Helmsley began active grantmaking, it has committed more than $1.5 billion for a wide range of charitable purposes. Helmsley’s Biomedical Research Infrastructure Program seeks to strengthen the research tools, training, and collaborative platforms for the health sciences and enhance the quality and reproducibility of biomedical data and findings. For more information, visit www.helmsleytrust.org.
